In computer vision and other imaging and computing contexts, depth images may be generated based on two (e.g., left and right or reference and target) two-dimensional images of a scene. For example, active stereo cameras may generate such depth images based on infrared (IR) images attained based on a projection of IR light onto the scene. Such depth images may be used in a wide variety of contexts such as object detection, object tracking, gesture recognition and device control based on such gestures, facial pose recognition and device control based on such facial gestures, three-dimensional scene reconstruction, scene understanding, virtual reality, augmented reality, and the like.
Furthermore, it may be desirable to generate such depth images in real time at high frame rates. In some contexts the generation of depth images may be implemented via hardware. Such hardware implementations may have limitations such as limited disparity value search ranges or the like that may degrade the quality of the depth image by leaving many pixels without depth values, for example.
It may be advantageous to generate high quality depth images in real time. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present improvements have been needed. Such improvements may become critical as the desire to utilize such depth images in a variety of applications becomes more widespread.